Research Scientist Dr. Lijun Wang, of the NEC Research Institute, is encouraged by this opportunity to create an open dialogue with RTC on theoretical quantum optics. His hope is to establish a link for the continued exchange of ideas. Wang says, "It is generally realized in the advanced technology industry that academic research can turn into fruitful outcomes for industry."
NEC Research Institute, established in 1989, is aimed at long-term research on communication and computer technologies. NEC policy encourages work with universities. "The NEC-RTC collaboration is a special case because both sides can bring different perspectives to the work," Wang says adding, "Rochester is very well known for research in optics."
The agreement between NEC and RTC required careful negotiation due to concern about ownership of any intellectual property created by the joint work. The research topic may turn out to be close to commercial application, but is of strong academic interest as well. A potential area of conflict in such joint projects is the need for delays in publication to allow patent filings.
Dr. Joseph Eberly, Director of the Rochester Theory Center, commented that "This is usually extremely tricky. These agreements for the sharing of intellectual property are frequently a roadblock to academic - industrial collaborations and that's why we feel so good about having gotten past this obstacle."
A major part of Dr Wang's research is related to solving the problem of errors that are produced by background noise in communication channels. A related area of his work is the application of quantum optics to cryptography.
"We can imagine that cryptography becomes more important in the near future, particularly for financial and other network transactions," says Wang. He and Eberly will be working with the RTC post-doc, examining the limits of optical communication as well as attempting to reduce noise in optical channels.
Eberly anticipates similar contacts to arise with other industrial research facilities. Currently RTC is discussing either formally or informally such arrangements with Corning, Inc., and Eastman Kodak.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has agreed to support the NEC-RTC project with a $65,000 grant provided through its GOALI (Grant Opportunities for Academic Liason with Industry) Program. Eberly says the NSF grant was awarded after NEC had already provided partial funding to RTC for a postdoctoral fellow. "NSF made this grant as a supplement to the original RTC grant," he says.
At the same time Dr. Liu was not forgetting the entirely different field of his Ph.D. research - atoms undergoing high-intensity ionization. Collaborating in RTC with Prof. J.H. Eberly, his paper on 2-electron correlation appeared in August in Physical Review Letters. As soon as his new teaching duties are under control, Dr. Liu expects to resume research collaborations with RTC.
Prof. Park has recently been studying the flow of optical solitons, and has just published results entitled "Parametric Control of Soliton Traffic by cw Traffic Light" in Physical Review Letters. Park and his co-author H.J. Shin describe a method for timing optical solitons using cw light pulses.
Prof. Park's Ph.D. is from Brandeis University. His postdoctoral work included gravity theory and high-energy theoretical physics at the University of Maryland and Cambridge University.
As previously announced, Assistant Professor Ali Kamli will arrive in August to take a position as an RTC Visiting Fellow during a sabbatical from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. His Ph.D. is from Southampton University, U.K., and his area of current research interest is the interaction of electromagnetic waves with quantum systems inside cavities and microstructures.
Walck is a Lehigh graduate and former NRC Postdoctoral Associate at the Naval Research Laboratory. He came to RTC in the Fall of 1997 with a tentative inclination toward a teaching career, and he found the Institute of Optics in need of a quantum mechanics instructor. At the end of the term Walck's teaching rating was the highest in the Institute and his inclination had turned into a firm intention.
Although he regards his new position as practically perfect for his long-term career goals, he also hopes he can find time to continue his research with RTC senior member Prof. Dennis Hall. As an RTC post-doc Walck worked in Hall's group on the optics of silver nanoparticles randomly placed on top of thin semiconductor-insulator structures.
Wolf has previously received five honorary doctorates from universities in The Netherlands, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, England, and Canada.
The subject of optical coherence in classical physics is largely Wolf's creation. His early papers on optical coherence in the 1950s are widely recognized as having laid the theoretical foundations of the subject, well before the discovery of the laser.
Prof. Daniel Courgeon of the University of Franche-Comté pays tribute to Wolf on this occasion saying, "...the development of any science involves the combination of several demands: a demand for creativity, a demand for interpretation and a demand for education... The ones who succeed simultaneously in the three fields are very rare due to the fact, as Einstein said, that one lifetime is often too short. Emil Wolf belongs to this minority."
"Industrial collaboration has played a central role role in the research of some, but certainly not a majority, of RTC post-docs to date," Eberly explained. He also noted that cross-disciplinary training is almost automatic in any area of modern optical research and is difficult to distinguish from conventional interactions of mentors with post-docs. He said that since RTC activities with specific cross-disciplinary and industrial research goals have been fewer than originally expected, dropping them will not affect the Center materially.
As the article on p. 1 indicates, the agreement to work with the NEC Research Institute on aspects of quantum communication is expected to be the model for RTC's future academic-industrial collaborations. The industrial partner will be asked to provide either seed money as startup assistance, or longer-term funding or possibly both. If appropriate, the NSF GOALI program can serve as an avenue for NSF support of specific industrial research contacts.
P. Scott Carney
"Optical Theorems in Statistical Wavefields with Applications"
Ph.D. Thesis, University of Rochester, Department of Physics and Astronomy (1999). Supervised by Prof. Emil Wolf.
Ashiqur Rahman
"Optical Pulse Propagation in Inhomogeneously Broadened V-type Three-level Media"
Ph.D. Thesis, University of Rochester, Department of Physics and Astronomy (1999). Supervised by Prof. J.H. Eberly.
Peer-Reviewed Publications:
Drew Maywar and Govind P. Agrawal
"Low-power All-optical Switching in Active Semiconductor Chirped Periodic Structures,"
Opt. Exp. 3:440 (1998).
G. Gbur and E. Wolf
"Phase Conjugation with Random Fields and with Deterministic and Random Scatterers,"
Opt. Lett. 24:10 (1999).
R.S. Knox
"Excited-State Equilibration and the Flourescence-absorption Ratio,"
Acta Physica Polonica A 95:85 (1999).
Paolo Bellomo and C.R. Stroud, Jr.
Comment on "Coherent States for the Hydrogen Atom,"
Phys. Rev. A 59:900 (1999).
T.D. Visser and E. Wolf
"Potential Scattering with Field Discontinuities at the Boundaries,"
Phys. Rev. E 59:2355 (1999).
Ashiqur Rahman and J.H. Eberly
"Numerical Experiments with Optical Pulses in V-type Media,"
Opt. Exp. 4:133 (1999).
S. Mukamel, A. Piryatinski, and V. Chernyak
"Two-Dimensional Raman Echoes; Femtosecond View of Molecular Structure and Vibrational Coherence," Accounts Chem. Res. 32:145 (1999).
Paolo Bellomo and C.R. Stroud, Jr.
"Classical Evolution of Quantum Elliptic States,"
Phys. Rev. A 59:2139 (1999).
R. Grobe, S.L. Haan, and J.H. Eberly
"A Split-domain Algorithm for Time-dependent Multi-electron Wave Functions,"
Comp. Phys. Comm. 117:200 (1999).
Denise Sawicki and J.H. Eberly
"Perfect Following in the Diabatic Limit,"
Opt. Exp. 4:217 (1999).
E. Wolf, T. Shirai, G. Agarwal and L. Mandel
"Storage and Retrieval of Correlation Functions of Partially Coherent Fields,"
Opt. Lett. 24:367 (1999).
G. Gbur, D. James and E. Wolf
"Energy Conservation Law for Randomly Fluctuating Electromagnetic Fields,"
Phys. Rev. E 59:4594 (1999).
P. Scott Carney
"The Optical Cross-section Theorem with Incident Fields Containing Evanescent Components,"
J. Mod. Opt. 46:891 (1999).
S. Yokojima, T. Meier, V. Chernyak, and S. Mukamel
"Femtosecond Four-Wave Mixing Spectroscopy of Magnetoexcitons in Semiconductor Quantum Wells,"
Phys. Rev. B 59:12584 (1999).
G. Gbur and K. Kim
"The Quasi-homogeneous Approximation for a Class of Three-dimensional Primary Sources,"
Opt. Commun. 163:20 (1999).
Pamela L. Greene and Dennis G. Hall
"Focal Shift in Vector Beams,"
Opt. Exp. 4:411 (1999).
P.S. Carney and G. Gbur
"Optimal Apodizations for Finite Apertures,"
J. Opt. Soc. Amer. A 16:1638 (1999).
Wei-Chih Liu and Marek W. Kowarz
"Vector Diffraction from Subwavelength Optical Disk Structures: Two-dimensional Modeling of Near-field Profiles, Far-field Intensities, and Detector Signals from a DVD,"
Appl. Opt. 38:3787 (1999).
V.V. Kozlov
"Self-induced-transparency Soliton Laser,"
JETP Letters 69:906 (1999).
V. Chernyak, A. Piryatinski, and S. Mukamel
"Complete Determination of Relaxation Parameters from Two-dimensional Raman Spectroscopy,"
Laser Chem. 19:109 (1999).
W.M. Zhang, V. Chernyak, and S. Mukamel
"Multidimensional Femtosecond Correlation Spectroscopies of Electronic and Vibrational Excitons,"
J. Chem. Phys. 110:5011 (1999).
Paolo Bellomo and C.R. Stroud, Jr.
"Coherent Stabilization of Zero-electron-kinetic-energy States,"
J. Chem. Phys. 110:7568 (1999).
E. Poliakov, V. Chernyak, S. Tretiak and S. Mukamel
"Exciton-scaling and Optical Excitations of Self-similar Phenylacetylene Dendrimers,"
J. Chem. Phys. 110:8161 (1999).
Y. Zhao, T. Meier, W. Zhang, V. Chernyak and S. Mukamel
"Superradiance Coherence Sizes in Single Molecule Spectroscopy of LH2 Antenna Complexes,"
J. Phys. Chem. 103:3954 (1999).
"Rydberg Electrons in Weak Fields: To be Quantum or not to be Quantum, that is not the Question," Paolo Bellomo, Institute of Optics, University of Rochester.
"Atomic Resolution Holography- From Idea to Reality," Gerhard Materlik, DESY Hamburg.
"Modeling and Simulation of Mode-locked Lasers," J.W. Haus, Department of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Lecture Series on Cold Atoms in Quantum Optics, by Mark Raizen, Department of Physics, University of Texas at Austin.
"Modeling of Intense Femtosecond Pulse Propagation in Gases and Dielectrics," Michal Mlejnek, Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona at Tucson.
"Polarization of Radiation from Localized Sources," Özgür Müstecaplioglu, Department of Physics, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.
"Jaynes-Cummings Model in a Leaky Cavity: An Exact Pure State Approach," C.K. Law, Department of Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Edited by:
Joel Byam
newsletter@pas.rochester.edu
Contributors:
Karen Burkin and Ashok Muthukrishnan
Mailing Address:
Rochester Theory Center for Optical Science and Engineering
University of Rochester, P.O. Box 270171
Rochester, NY 14627-0171, USA
Phone: (716) 275-3288